ojai news at The Ojai Post :: blog, newspaper, events in Ojai, California

Anybody out to make a buck is quite likely to allow dollars to get ahead of their common sense and sensible behavior, even if they start out being greener than green. There might be exceptions to this rule, but I'm betting that they're rare exceptions. People chasing money tend to slowly lose sight of just about everything else, and the bigger the wad of cash the more quickly they seem to develop tunnel vision. The wind power industry, once the darling of environmentalists almost everywhere, has done just about everything it can to keep its own studies on migratory bird deaths from being made public. The turbines have been especially rough on raptors, but all birds species that attempt to traverse the wind farms are equally at risk, and the deaths are estimated to run in the tens of thousands each year at each installation. Birds fly into the rotating vanes just as they fly into skyscrapers, but unfortunately for the birds, these wind farms are built along their ancient migratory flyways because that's where the wind is. You can find plenty of info about this phenomenon online, but you'll be hard-pressed find the pertinent EIR data that the generation companies themselves were forced to produce.

I'd like to know what the downside might be to enormous solar farms that would cover hundreds of acres (if not eventually hundreds of thousands of acres) of wild public lands, and as with everything else that humans dream up, I know that there will be a downside -- just as there has been with wind turbines and ethanol production. Anyone who doesn't want us to know what that downside is is just as suspect as are those who would sabotage the development of alternative energy.

What sense does it make to work hard to prevent urban sprawl from covering the West if we're not going to bat an eye at the thought of solar farms doing the same thing? I like the idea of people installing solar power equipment on their own houses, but this past year there was a court case in the Bay area where a man with solar panels was able to legally force his neighbor to cut down his trees because they blocked his light, and the trees had been there long before the solar equipment.

There are always unintended consequences, and I'd like to know that someone out there is trying to figure out what at least some of those consequences might be before we find out the hard way and have to try to force someone to remove many millions of dollars worth of equipment from land that we all ostensibly own. Now, if the BLM is just shilling for the petroleum industry, I say screw 'em, and we need to make sure that they are absolutely not the ones doing the study on solar farms, but the study still needs to be done, nonetheless.

yes, BUT the sun was there before the trees

Nuclear power is looking better all the time. Nothing in this world is totally safe, and nothing is perfect. We have to weigh the pros and cons. Do we want to cover our entire deserts and other open space with solar panels and windmills? With the breader reactor technology now that is available the amount of "waste" is so infinitesimally small it's mind blowing. Even with current technology the amount is small. The plants themselves take up very small areas as well.

BTW our stupid politicians are on vacation now and doing nothing to help you deal with these outragously high fuel prices, let tell them to do something for a change! They could care less about you and the bills you have to pay because they all get free cars and free gas paid for by you. A big time revolt is coming, when we are at $7.00 a gallon do you think people are going to stand for this BS. We are sitting on a ham sandwich starving to death. Between Anwar, the Santa Barbara Channel, and other areas we have more oil that Saudia Arabia and we can't get it? If anybody is holding out for solar I have news for you, it will NEVER amount to more than 10% of our energy needs. Solar does nothing for our transportation needs anyway.

The truth about Anwar:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3723

Cost is much too high, we've been over this before
Brian will never learn inside a room without a door
he toots his horn and it is off key
but he can't hear it over his tv
he sits and stares at his boob tube god
it tells him what to think and he just nods
pay no attention to the man behind curtain
radiation kills - this much is certain